Avira, a popular European antivirus, has become a partner of AdGuard and added the ad blocking feature based on our technology and filters to their browser extensions. The developers have made this decision after carrying out research that defined the percentage of malicious elements which get on websites via ad networks, thus showing that malvertising is a serious and growing threat.

Out of 894,000 threat detections Avira URL Cloud made in February 2017, almost a quarter ( 24%) could be tracked to domains of five popular advertising networks. This means that in fact, the share of malicious elements delivered to websites by ad networks must be higher — there are other ad networks besides the five researched, and less known networks can be even more vulnerable.

Corporate security experts RiskIQ calculated that in 2016 the malicious advertising increased by 132% in 2016 and continues to grow. Malvertising can infect a computer with viruses, steal financial information, send users to fraudulent sites, be false and deceiving.

Adguard-powered ad blocking will be on by default in Avira’s both browser extensions: Safe Shopping (protects during online shopping and helps to find best deals) and Browser Safety (antivirus extension for Opera and Mozilla Firefox).